speak in tongues, loss is loss
by Kuro49
Summary: They each have rabbits to chase.


/long scream of contentment. This movie is so great, and I am drowning in an abundance of family feeeeels. Thank you to Pacific Rim Wiki, nothing could have been possible without it. ;) (I would have loved to write some of the Russian Jaeger team and the Wei triplets... but they were too pedestrian for characterizations... WHY FILM WHY.)

XXX

**speak in tongues, loss is loss**

XXX

Jaeger is the German word for _Hunter_.

(Kaijū is the Japanese word for _Monster_.)

And fear is a complicated thing because it is so much like hope.

000

Marshal Pentecost has a clock he can't reset.

It ticks from the inside out and slowly kills him in front of the one thing he wants to protect more than the world. It is a bomb counting down until he can no longer wipe away the blood from his nose (the drugs hasn't been enough for a long time now). He has been with the Jaeger Program from the start, from year zero, and he will be there with it until the Portal collapses on itself.

Stacker still remembers everything about the level II Kaijū the world comes to name as Onibaba but he only comes to care about a little girl in her blue dress and red shoes.

He knows he can't co-pilot a Jaeger with Mako.

So he tells her how proud he is instead.

000

Mako's been running for too long.

She doesn't know how to stop, doesn't know anything but the pain at the soles of her feet and the thundering footsteps coming up from behind, like the fear that swells and swells and bursts. Her cheeks are dry but it feels as though she has been crying for a long, long time.

The sword is broad and it weighs the world in her hand.

"Kazoku no tame ni."

She tells Raleigh, like it could be something he doesn't understand (like there isn't a third person standing right behind them, whispering _Rals_ like a mantra in the way he has been whispering _Yancy_ in the back of his mind since five years ago).

"For family."

Her co-pilot echoes back in the Drift, standing beside the little girl rubbing her tear stained cheeks dry with the back of her hands, looking up at Coyote Tango with splatters of blue in the ruins of Tokyo.

000

Raleigh's mind is a fractured, broken thing.

There is never a day that he doesn't wake up with Yancy's name on his tongue, a murmur that rises until his eyes snap open to realize that the neural bridge between the Becket brothers has been severed for a long, long time now.

Even when he is used to working around the restrictions of his left arm, Raleigh remains that he doesn't want it healing into a scar that will make Yancy a thing of his past. He can't forget the red, angry lines over his chest and sides or the way he loses a portion of himself when his brother is torn from his side.

Raleigh doesn't hope that the meld with Mako will be anything like the bond he once had when he fits the helmet over his head, joining his mind to hers.

And it's not.

It is not better or worse. It is different when she reminds him that he can't lose anything without taking something in return. And it is the same when he co-pilots Gipsy Danger again just to see his brother in the Drift, smiling his smile and calling him _Rals_, fitting into the broken crevices of their severed bond.

He lets out a laugh at the spark of recognition, turns to his left when he is used to his right, and catches the smile curving over Mako's lips in return.

000

Chuck's a lot of things.

He reminds his father of his mother with his blonde hair, blue eyes, and memories of devastation in Sydney. He is cocky, he has issues and a temper. Still, he has the world record of having the most Kaijū killed, a win in the midst of all the losses, (a record that will die with him but he doesn't know that, no one does, not when the coming apocalypse brings nothing new into perspective).

Striker Eureka goes dark around them in a burst of electromagnetic pulse, their minds separate as two in a shock. Being thrown back into his own head is reeling, his heart beating frantic at the dark. He only hears his own gasps of breaths interrupting the solid silence before he slowly comes back to himself.

But Chuck is his father's son.

And that has always been something he never needs to say when he follows his father out of their Jaeger to face the monster in the sea.

000

Herc's not a man with a lot.

He has experience and a bulldog on a leash slobbering at his feet barking for a son that isn't coming home. But the apocalypse is cancelled, as per the Marshall's demand, and the years of dare-we-hope relief is breathed out in one short shudder.

Chuck's last smile twisting like the pain in his bandaged arm.

And then he aches, something that goes bone deep and isn't ever going to fade. Herc turns from the clock that is now reading zero and faces the world's remaining Shatterdome. There are no Jaegers, just memories of noise from the past, of metal welding and programs being updated. He closes his eyes, remembering the first time he synchronizes his mind to Striker Eureka, the only one of the Mark-5 series.

It is the same rush of entering the Drift when he does it for the last time, Chuck's mind meeting his, touching then tangling until there is no telling one from the other.

(Like father, like son, there are no secrets in a Jaeger.)

So, they don't say sorry when four goes and only two return.

They don't need to.

He can hear what isn't being said.

000

Jaegers are things of the past.

But it is simple to remember them in the last of their glory days.

XXX Kuro

I just want to put them all in a Kaijū-proof bunker and never let them out so they stay safe, and _alive_ damnit.


End file.
